July 21, 2006

Robin Jennison

I recently had the opportunity to meet Robin Jennison, Republican candidate for Kansas governor, and I was impressed. I think he would make an excellent governor. He served in the Kansas Legislature for 10 years and rose to House speaker.Jennison told me he was a strong advocate for local control of our schools. He is committed to reforming the current school finance formula. Currently 18 percent of the school-age children in Kansas reside in Johnson County. Thirty percent of the revenue for Kansas school support comes from Johnson County. Johnson County receives back only 8 percent of the total funding. This poor return on our money is not reasonable. That is why the school finance formula must be changed and local control returned to our school districts.I urge you to join with me in voting on Aug. 1 for Robin Jennison as governor and Dennis Wilson as lieutenant governor. Wilson is a state senator from Johnson County and is a former Johnson County treasurer.Glenn E. SchreiberOverland Park

Comments

Yeah, I buy that. Lets make sure that Johnson county is the ONLY county in Kansas that can educate its children and who cares about the 84% of the kids. Who cares about the rural school districts that do not have a tax base to support their schools. Who cares about the districts that will be forced to consolidate (as they had to in Western Nebraska) forcing kids to sometimes travel 40 or 50 MILES to a school. I am sure you do not understand the difference between the rich, elitist in Johnson County and the barely making it farmer in the Western Part of the state. It seem all republicans are the same these days, especially if they come from Johnson County. The message I always seem to read and hear is that Johnson County is all that matters and we should have the right to do whatever we want at the cost of the rest of Kansas falling apart. Why not just jump ship, form your own government, and turn into the local form of the District of Columbia. You can name yourselves The Independent State of Johnson County, Esq.
I am so sick of this. Unless you are a teacher you do not understand education enough to understand the financial issues of the business. Local Control is great......give control back to the STATES as it is supposed to be constitutionally. But, to be legally responsible, the state will still have to treat education as a social issue and redistribute the wealth IF YOU EXPECT KANSAS TO EVER GET AHEAD IN THE COUNTRY!

If you want to leave Kansas behind by taking away the ability of half the districts to exist, then by all means elect someone who wants to only allow local control. What needs to happen is you keep the current formula (of course it does need to be tweeked some) and you allow local districts to subsidize that with additional taxes.
The other thing you do is take Johnson County and stop building million dollar homes. This will lower your tax base and thereby decrease the amount of money JC puts into the state coffers.
Those of you who live in JC have created what you see as disparity by building such large homes with such high values. Think about it.

Until you know about education and truly understand the finances of education...do not talk about taking away money from one to enrich the already rich.